University Digital Conservancy :: Browsing by Subject "Homelessness"

Browsing by Subject "Homelessness"

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Context, cortisol, and executive functions among children experiencing homelessness.
(2011-08) Cutuli, Joseph J.
Homelessness represents a context of risk for child development. Yet, many homeless children show good develop outcomes, nonetheless. The processes of risk and resilience that contribute to this variability involve adaptive systems impacted by factors across levels of analysis, such as cortisol and physiology, executive functions (EF) and other aspects of psychological functioning, and parenting behavior and the family context. This study employs a resilience framework that is grounded in developmental-ecological theory and recognizes factors at multiple levels of analysis. The goal is to elucidate explanatory models of the processes of risk and resilience by incorporating relationships with cortisol, a component of physiological adaptive systems related to the stress response, self-regulation, and other functions. Families in this study were all staying in an emergency homeless shelter and contained a child entering kindergarten or first grade. Children were separated from caregivers and completed a session of cognitive tasks that assessed executive functions and other abilities, followed by a session of parent-child interaction tasks. Saliva samples were collected throughout both sessions and assayed for cortisol concentrations. Parents reported on risk factors and stressful negative life events for each child. Initial levels of child cortisol were negatively related to EF, affirming a proposed inverted-U relationship between cortisol and cognition among this sample of high-risk children. Higher rates of stressful, negative life events were not related to cortisol, nor was positive parenting behavior. However, harsh, hostile, and insensitive parenting behaviors were related to higher levels of child cortisol, but only during the session when parent and child were together. There were no differences based on variables of interested when it came to changes in cortisol over either session. Results are discussed with respect to proposed mechanisms of the interface between cortisol, parenting and EF at different levels of analysis in the context of high developmental risk.
A Continuum Divided: Breaking Down Silos and Setting Up Tables Between Homelessness and Domestic Violence Services in HEARTH Act Implemenation
(Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, 2016) Duchscherer, Heather
In 2009, Congress passed the HEARTH Act calling for greater coordination among housing and homelessness programs. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grantees are now required to apply and operate within localized Continuums of Care (CoCs). CoCs must also develop a coordinated assessment (CA)1 process which seeks to create a process in which an appropriate match is made between programs and people in an efficient manner with the ultimate outcome of ending homelessness within communities. Each CoC has great latitude in how they implement CA, but many of these processes have involved the collection and sharing of data – an element which has caused great concern on the part of domestic violence (DV) advocates and victim service providers (VSPs). In the past decade, DV advocates and VSPs have increasingly moved their focus from simply removing victims from crisis situations to also ensuring victim have access to the socioeconomic resources needed to maintain their safety over time. This shift has led more and more VSPs to provide not just emergency shelter but also various housing assistance programs – programs that have not historically been funded through the DV system – leading VSPs to seek funding in the homeless housing system. However, the move of agencies like HUD toward system-wide collection of data conflicts with policies like within the DV system, such as the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), that prohibit sharing of personally-identifying information by VSPs. Although, these data are ostensibly used only by system administrators for the purpose of measuring outcomes and efficiencies, there is great concern by DV systems that system administrators with access to personal data might also be the same individuals that victims are trying to escape. With the passage and implementation of the HEARTH Act, DV shelter and housing providers increasingly found themselves trying to comply with two contradictory policy mandates and state and federal DV policy advocates were tasked with understanding and explaining housing and homelessness policies and regulations.
Developing evidence-based effective principles for working with homeless youth: a developmental Evaluation of the Otto Bremer Foundation's support for collaboration among agencies serving homeless youth
(2014-02) Murphy, Nora F.
The purpose of this research was trifold. First, it was an attempt to gain an understanding of the experiences of fourteen unaccompanied, homeless youth between the ages of 18 and 24, living in the Twin Cities metro area, who have utilized services at two or more of the six grantee organizations. The second purpose was to understand how the shared principles of these organizations have been implemented in practice. The third purpose was to explore the extent to which implementation of these principles helps lead to healthy youth development from the perspective of the youth. This study was conducted as part of The Otto Bremer Foundation (OBF) Support for Homeless Youth and is a component of a utilization-focused developmental evaluation. The researcher employed a multiple case study approach. Qualitative data were generated from interviews with the youths themselves, street workers, agency staff, and Foundation staff. Fourteen individual case studies were written, and a cross-case analysis was conducted. The analysis provides insight into how the principles are enacted, as well as how they support a young person's healthy trajectory. This study found that all nine principles were evident in case stories, albeit some more than others. All principles interacted and overlapped, but each added something unique to the organizations' approach to working with youth. Implications for practice, policy, and funding are discussed.
The Difference that Seeing Makes: Homelessness and Visuality in Urban Ecology
(2020-07) Goldfischer, Eric
This project examines the impact of green urban development on the visibility of homelessness and the lives and livelihood of people experiencing it in New York City. Images of homelessness have long played an outsized role in the geography of urban development. In particular, photography of those living without a home has both presaged displacement and produced discourses that play upon racialized images to produce harmful notions of safety, policing/crime, and public space, all of which impact the city’s development priorities. But in recent years, New York City’s development model has shifted extensively to focus on environmental sustainability, an emphasis that, on the surface, has little to do with homelessness. This dissertation asks: How does the anti-homelessness at the heart of urban development shift when the development agenda cares the most about green spaces, horticulture, and sustainability metrics? In addressing this question, the dissertation relies on a research partnership with Picture the Homeless, a grassroots homeless-led organization in NYC that focuses on the importance of “picturing” homelessness in its full systemic context as a key component of social justice work. Building on this partnership and utilizing community-based research methods, ethnography, and semi-structured interviews with urban designers and local policymakers, I argue that we should understand homelessness in urban ecology through a frame of “green anti-homelessness.” Green anti-homelessness, I show, works in two key ways: By using horticulture and green design to mitigate, rather than destroy, the visibility of homelessness, and by shifting the value of urban spaces towards a narrow definition of urban sustainability that precludes many forms of ecologically-beneficial grassroots activities such as can recycling or reusing materials for survival. These findings demonstrate the importance of the relationship between urban ecology and homelessness, and open future pathways for further research on green anti-homelessness, the images associated with it, and broadened understandings of urban sustainability.
Emotion Regulation and Socialization in the Context of Cumulative Risk: Social-Emotional Adjustment in Children Experiencing Homelessness
(2018-08) Labella, Madelyn
The acquisition of emotion regulation skills is a key developmental task, largely socialized by caregivers, that lays the foundation for healthy social-emotional adjustment. Unfortunately, both parental socialization and children’s self-regulation are disrupted in contexts of high cumulative risk. The current dissertation evaluated emotion regulation and socialization during observed parent-child interaction as predictors of social-emotional adjustment in young children experiencing homelessness. Study 1 used linear regression and latent profile analysis to identify links among child reactivity and regulation, parental affect profiles, and teacher-reported adjustment in the context of risk and adversity. Children’s difficulty down-regulating anger during parent-child interaction was linked to more teacher-reported social-behavioral problems. Empirically-derived profiles of parent affect were related to child behavior during the interaction and in the classroom: the minority of parents showing elevated anger had children who were observed to struggle with anger down-regulation and were reported by teachers to have more social-behavioral problems at school. Sociodemographic risk additionally predicted more social-behavioral problems, controlling for child and parent anger expression. Study 2 built on these findings using dynamic structural equation modeling to investigate dyadic interplay between parent and child anger across the problem-solving discussion. Parents and children showed significant stability in anger from one interval to the next, as well as cross-lagged associations consistent with bidirectional feedback processes and significant novel anger reactivity. Individual differences in child anger stability were related to more social-behavioral problems at school. More observed anger contagion, particularly from child to parent, predicted more parent-reported externalizing problems, as did higher family adversity. Results are interpreted in light of theory and research and future directions are discussed.
Factors accounting for change in effective parenting following homelessness.
(2012-08) Plowman, Elizabeth Jeanne
When homeless, families experience disruptions that may compromise parents’ abilities to demonstrate effective caregiving behaviors with their children. Consistently supportive parenting practices, however, are critical for children’s adaptive development within highly stressful environments. Although supportive housing sites provide families with affordable, private housing, it is unknown if parenting practices change or remain stable as families navigate from homeless to housed status. The purpose of this study was to describe change in observed effective parenting practices of 229 formerly homeless parent-child dyads over three years, and to examine the role of individual and contextual factors in contributing to change processes. Mothers and children, enrolled in a randomized control trial, participated annually in 26-min of videotaped interaction tasks on four measurement occasions. Using second-order latent growth curve modeling, we examined growth in a latent factor of effective parenting. The effective parenting factor met assumptions of strong factorial invariance, providing evidence that change in the construct was attributed to true growth rather than measurement error. Results indicated that group-level effective parenting improved over time, although individuals demonstrated variability in change. A quadratic fixed factor model provided the best fit to the data; effective parenting increased, but improvements tapered off as time passed. Parents who reported lower levels of parenting self-efficacy at baseline experienced greater improvements in parenting. Perceived social support, participation in a prevention program, and history of residential instability did not predict growth. Results are discussed in the context of intervention and parenting in transition.
Finding Home: A Qualitative Study on Healing Homelessness through Expressive Arts Engagement
(2019-07) Bueno, José
This phenomenological study seeks to expand the understanding of the impacts of expressive arts engagement on the mental health and trauma among homeless youth through the experiences of professionals working with those populations. Organizations across Massachusetts and Minnesota were selected based off their organizational mission statements for helping the homeless youth population, as well as referrals. This study demonstrates expressive arts engagement as one of the many tools in working through trauma and mental illness seen in the homeless youth population. Organizations should work towards the successful integration of the arts and healing mental illness found among youth homelessness.
The impact of executive function and emotional control and understanding on the behavioral functioning and academic achievement of children living in emergency homeless shelters.
(2012-08) LaFavor, Theresa L.
This study examined the impact of executive function (EF) and emotional control and understanding on the behavioral functioning and academic achievement of 86 homeless children, ages 9 to 11. Executive function skills were assessed using parent report, child's performance on four standard behavioral tasks, and teacher report. Emotional control was assessed using parent report on standard measures of emotion regulation. Emotional understanding was assessed using child performance on a standard measure of affect recognition. Risk and adversity were assessed using parent report on widely used measures of sociodemographic variables, and negative and stressful life events. Indices of behavioral functioning included parent and teacher report of externalizing and internalizing problems. Indices of academic achievement included child's performance on standard measures of mathematical operations and word reading. Results indicate that executive function may be an important marker of academic achievement and behavioral functioning. Performance on executive function tasks predicted academic achievement, and parent reports of internalizing behaviors. Executive function emerged a unique predictor above and beyond children's general intelligence, a key correlate of achievement and behavioral functioning among both low and high risk samples. The effects of risk and adversity, specifically negative and stressful events experienced in the past 12 months, emerged as a unique predictor of achievement and behavioral functioning. Children who experienced more recent negative and stressful life events had lower academic achievement and higher parent reported externalizing and internalizing behaviors. Emotional control emerged as a unique predictor of academic achievement, above and beyond executive function and children's intelligence, suggesting that aspects of emotion regulation are important for academic functioning and success. Implications of these findings are discussed with relation to future intervention and the potential of EF as a focus of intervention.
“Missed Opportunities” in the Pathway from Referral to Housing, A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Success, Timeliness, and Disparities in Hennepin County’s Coordinated Entry System
(2020-05) Barthel, Jordon; Bashir, Adil; Danielson, Erin; Diles, Taylor; Griffin, Lara; Letofsky, Cara; Mach, Dana
Hennepin County began concentrated work to address homelessness in late 2006, and the resulting Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness marked a greater level of attention to the growing population of individuals and families experiencing homelessness in the county. Since then, many revisions of this strategy have ultimately coalesced into the Hennepin County Coordinated Entry System. Under many of the guidelines set forth by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, this system attempts to properly assess, refer, and house individuals and families staying in homeless shelters throughout the county, with the explicit goal of providing equitable housing services to the most vulnerable clients.
Parent-child relationships in young homeless families: co-regulation as a predictor of child self-regulation and school adjustment
(2011-08) Herbers, Janette E.
Developing adaptive behaviors are particularly important for children growing up in contexts of risk and adversity. This study examined the role of effective parenting for school success in a high-risk sample of children, focusing on co-regulation experiences with parents in relation to child self-regulation skills. In early childhood, it is largely through experiences of co-regulation within the caregiver-child relationship that children develop self-regulation. These skills are carried forward into other contexts of learning and development, including the school environment. The current thesis examined parent-child relationships among 138 families residing in emergency homeless shelter prior to the children entering kindergarten and first grade. Using observational data and state space grid methodology, I examined the parent-child relationship as a dynamic system with implications for children‟s school success and executive function (a central component of self-regulation). Results indicated that the positive co-regulation experiences were related to executive function capabilities and IQ in the child, which in turn were related to school outcomes. Parent responsiveness in particular was related to positive school outcomes. Person-oriented cluster analyses of individual state space grids revealed distinct types of dyads among the homeless families, highlighting individual differences in dyadic functioning. Findings support theory and earlier findings in developmental and resilience science implicating effective parenting in the acquisition of adaptive skills among children who overcome adversity, in part through processes of co-regulation that shape or scaffold the development of self-regulation and related cognitive skills in young children.
Parenting and children’s adjustment in families living in supportive housing.
(2010-06) Dillon, Kristin Ann
The purpose of this paper was to examine parenting and children's adjustment in the under-researched population of families living in supportive housing. The impact of specific dimensions of observed parenting on teacher-reported school-aged children's internalizing and externalizing symptoms were examined between two time points one year apart. Data from 77 families enrolled in the Early Risers: Healthy Families prevention study were used. Higher observed parenting dimensions of skill encouragement and positive involvement at baseline were associated with lower children's externalizing scores at one-year follow-up. However, higher observed problem solving was associated with higher children's internalizing scores at one-year follow-up. These findings offer evidence that positive parenting practices have the potential to impact externalizing symptoms over time, while the relationship between parenting and internalizing symptoms may be more complex.
Parenting Resilience in the Context of Homelessness: Risk and Protective Factors
(2015-08) McCormick, Christopher
Homelessness among families with children has become a surprisingly common and persistent problem. Children who experience the disruptions of homelessness are at increased risk for difficulties with academic, social, emotional, and behavioral development. Decades of research on resilience suggests that effective parenting helps to mitigate the effects of adversity on child development. However, relatively little is known about factors that predict parenting quality during family homelessness. This study examined predictors of parenting quality among 138 families who were staying in three Minneapolis emergency housing shelters, with the goal of identifying distal and proximal influences on parenting in families facing homelessness. Based on transactional-ecological systems perspectives on the determinants of parenting, and research on risk and protective processes for parenting under stress, current parenting in a shelter context was expected to relate to recent and past adversity of the parent and current health and social resources. Current trauma, anxiety, and depressive symptoms in parents were expected to interfere with effective parenting. Two basic dimensions of parenting, warmth and structure, were expected to underlie observed parenting assessed by three empirically validated observational coding techniques. Factor analyses indicated two dimensions of parenting; however, these reflected a blend of warmth/structure and a distinct factor of negativity. Thus, subsequent analyses predicted parenting on each of these two dimensions, using linear methods of path analysis and multiple regression to test for predictive, mediating, and moderating effects of earlier and recent adversity, physical and mental health, and available resources on parenting quality. Also tested was the moderating influence of resources, specifically cognitive resources and social support, on the relationship between adversity, mental health, and parenting quality. Finally, a person-centered analytic approach was used to provide an integrated portrait of resilient parenting in the context of homelessness. Controlling for parent age, sex, and child behavior, parents’ adverse experiences in childhood were positive related to warmth/structure, contrary to expectations, whereas current resources, as predicted, were positively and independently associated with this aspect of effective parenting. Resources did not moderate any of these relationships. Parents classified as showing resilience in the person-focused analyses had greater cognitive, social, and emotional resources than parents classified as maladaptive. Strengths and limitations of this study are discussed in relation to future research and the goals of identifying malleable protective influences on parenting for families in challenging situations.
A social ecology of stress and coping among homeless refugee families.
(2011-08) Im, Hyojin
Refugee families undergo multiple challenges and hardships that tend to cause tremendous psychological distress in the migration and resettlement processes. This dissertation research was designed to explore refugee families' mental health in the social ecological contexts of displacement and homelessness and to investigate stressors and coping in relation to transition of resources including social capital of refugee families. With three theoretical frameworks, a social ecology theory, stress and coping theory, and social capital theory, the author developed a series of hypothetical statements as well as research questions to modify and refine hypotheses on stress and coping processes of refugee families. A modified analytic induction method was adopted for analysis of interview data from 26 Hmong and Somali families in Twin Cities area. The findings of this study revealed that psychological distress was deeply associated with challenges and transition in resources at various levels. Rearrangement of resources (cultural resources in particular) occurred after resettlement, which tended to impede coping capacity of refugee families and cause acculturation stress. Social capital, both bonding and linking, functioned as a critical form of resource for refugee families to resettle and adjust to the host community by supplementing personal, family, and cultural resources that are often sparse in refugee communities. The results of the current study imply that it is a critical coping strategy for refugee families to build or increase social capital, which sometimes leads families' secondary migration in search of better bonding social capital. This study also demonstrated high levels of psychological distress among refugee families, ranging from traumatic experiences before migration to acute stress after homelessness. Exposure to traumatic events before and during migration was salient in refugee families, while a lack of resources and frustrated coping strategies contributed to tremendous distress, which has been a chronic condition for the refugee families. This dissertation underscores the importance of social work practice focusing on culturally responsive resettlement services considering various challenges and cultural coping of refugee families. Policy interventions promoting family and bonding social capital are also critical to improve resettlement outcomes as well as refugee mental health.
Viewpoint: Turning streets into housing
(Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2021) Millard-Ball, Adam
I argue that wide residential streets in US cities are both a contributor to homelessness and a potential strategy to provide more affordable housing. In residential neighborhoods, subdivision ordinances typically set binding standards for street width, far in excess of what is economically optimal or what private developers and residents would likely prefer. These street width standards are one contributor to high housing costs and supply restrictions, which exacerbate the housing affordability crisis in high-cost cities. Planning for autonomous vehicles highlights the overprovision of streets in urban areas. Because they can evade municipal anti-camping restrictions that restrict the use of streets by unhoused people, autonomous camper vans have the ability to blur the distinction between land for housing and land for streets. I propose two strategies through which excess street space can accommodate housing in a formalized way. First, cities could permit camper van parking on the right-of-way, analogous to liveaboard canal boats that provide housing options in some UK cities. Second, extending private residential lots into the right-of-way would create space for front-yard accessory dwelling units.

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